Judicial Follies by Frank Zotter Jr.

In his Christmas classic, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, told the story of the Grinch, a creature annoyed (as would be any sane person) by the frenzy of Christmas season -- the noise, the presents, the feasting -- in the nearby town of Whoville. The Grinch gets revenge by making a truly terrible Christmas movie with Jim Carrey playing him, knowing that it will poison Christmas television presentations for all time.

Well, okay -- there was an awful version of the story with Jim Carrey playing the Grinch, but in the original story, the Grinch steals all the trappings of Christmas. On Christmas Day, though, the folks from Whoville celebrate Christmas anyway .?.?. teaching the Grinch that perhaps the holiday might mean something more than just gifts and merry-making (a recognition typically lost on most folks in real life).

Still, lest one think this purely fictitious, a real-life Grinch named Richard Ganulin appeared in 1998, living not outside Whoville but in Cincinnati, Ohio. Ganulin sued the United States government in Cincinnati federal court in August, 1998. He represented himself -- usually a tip-off there's something wrong with a lawsuit. After all, if someone in this country can't find a lawyer who'll represent them .?.?. well, it must really be a bad case.

Ganulin's lawsuit asserted that the federal law making Christmas a holiday for government workers was a violation of the separation of church and state, as embodied in the First Amendment to the Constitution (which prohibits an "establishment of religion"). After some legal maneuvering, the defendants asked Judge Susan Dlott to dismiss the case on the ground that Ganulin's lawsuit was baseless. They contended that it was perfectly legal for Congress to make Christmas Day a holiday.

Judge Dlott, shall we say, signaled where she was going at the beginning of her opinion. It opens with nine stanzas of verse written (more or less) in the anapestic tetrameter (yes, that's what it's called) for which Dr. Seuss himself was famous -- demonstrating yet again that, for whatever reason, judges are often peculiarly unsuited to write poetry:

The Court will address

Plaintiff's seasonal confusion

Erroneously believing Christmas

Merely a religious intrusion.

Whatever the reason

Constitutional or other

Christmas is not

An act of big brother!

Christmas is about joy

And giving and sharing

It is about the child within us

It is mostly about caring!

One is never jailed

For not having a tree

For not going to church

For not spreading glee!

The court will uphold

Seemingly contradictory causes

Decreeing "the establishment" and "Santa"

Both worthwhile "claus(es)!"

We are all better for Santa

The Easter bunny too

And maybe the Great Pumpkin

To name just a few!

An extra day off

Is hardly high treason

It may be spent as you wish

Regardless of reason.

The court having read

The lessons of "Lynch"

Refuses to play

The role of the Grinch!

There is room in this country

And in all our hearts too

For different convictions

And a day off too!

The "Lynch" in the penultimate stanza refers to Lynch v. Donnelly, one of the more important Establishment Clause cases, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Christmas displays on public property as long as they featured things like Santa, flying reindeer and a candy-striped North Pole. (For reasons too complicated to explain here, a talking wishing well and a sign saying it's a "Salute to Liberty" never hurt, either.) Judge Dlott helpfully included a footnote explaining who the Grinch was (yet remained oddly silent about Charles Schulz and the Great Pumpkin).

Just to show she wasn't frivolous herself, however, Judge Dlott then launched into about a dozen pages of the dense legal analysis judges normally get paid for. She deemed it a "close call" whether Ganulin was an "injured party" entitled to bring the lawsuit, but decided that issue in his favor. Nevertheless, as signaled by her doggerel, she dismissed the lawsuit anyway, finding Christmas had both a secular and a religious significance.

Ganulin, perhaps stung by the ridicule of the judge's verse, appealed. Unfortunately, the federal appeals court didn't pick up on Judge Dlott's light-heartedness, and upheld her decision in a five-sentence paragraph (without any poetry) -- though it did rule just a week before Christmas, 2000.

Undaunted, Ganulin tried to interest the U.S. Supreme Court in the case. It rejected his request in just one sentence -- in the very un-Christmasy month of April.